“Not Provided” Keywords in Analytics

Those of you analysing your Google Analytics will notice that a percentage of your referring keywords will display as ‘not provided’. This has come about due to Google introducing a new security measure protecting particular user searches. Summed up quite nicely by Econsultancy:

“Before October 18th 2011, whenever visits landed on your site from its search results pages, Google would happily tell you all of the keywords they’d searched for. After October 18th, Google started hiding(!) lots of this information.”

This has all come as a measure to protect users that are signed into Google.com, ensuring their privacy is maintained.

Is this a big deal?

Maybe not right now, but as the use of Google products increases you have to wonder how many users will end up staying signed into whilst conducting online search activity. Within the official notification from Google, they state that the “change will affect only a minority of your traffic” however early reports realised in the U.S are already signalling an impact on over 10% of searches for some analytics accounts.

If you are concerned about the insight you are losing because of the introduction of SSL search take a look at Econsultancy’s hack post.